The Goose Girl

Author: Shannon Hale

This week I am going to review The Goose Girl, a book that I’m quite excited about! When The Goose Girl was published back in 2003, it received mostly positive reviews from book critics, though some complained about the length of the book.  Three more books followed, making it a series called The Books of Bayern.  An awesome friend of mine gave me this book recently (thanks again RB!), and I was quite excited to read it as I had read some of Shannon Hale’s others books before, which include The Ever After High series (books based on the Mattel doll brand that’s sadly discontinued) and Diana: Princess of the Amazons, which is about Wonder Woman’s childhood.  I personally think Hale is a fantastic writer and, since The Goose Girl was her debut novel, I couldn’t wait to read it.  Hale always writes about strong female characters in very intriguing settings.  I look forward to continuing this series and checking out more of Hale’s other books, and I hope this review will inspire you to check out some of her books too!

The Goose Girl (based on the fairy tale from the Brother’s Grimm) is about Princess Anidori Kiladra (Ani for short) who is the Crown Princess of the kingdom Kildenree. Ani spends the first years of her life listening to her aunt’s stories and learning the language of the birds, most especially the swans.  Ani feels very comfortable around birds and animals in general but, even as she gets older, she is never quite comfortable speaking with people.  When Ani is 16, her mother the queen announces that Ani is betrothed to a prince in the neighboring kingdom of Bayern and must prepare for a long journey ahead of her.  On the way to Bayern, Ani is betrayed by her lady-in-waiting who is jealous of Ani and her title.  Shocked and devastated, Ani must become Bayern’s goose girl (caretaker of their geese) and learn to fend for herself so that she can earn her title back.  I’ve read some of Hale’s books in the past and have enjoyed most of them, so I was excited to know how she did with her debut novel; and I’d have to say now that she did quite well! The book is very well-written, the characters are awesome (including some funny animal sidekicks), there’s a romance that’s very sweet, and the way Hale describes the kingdoms makes you feel as if you are there yourself.  However, the book at times is surprisingly dark, some beloved characters die in gruesome ways, and sometimes it seems that Hale spends too much time on descriptions of The Forest (but thankfully she doesn’t go as far in her nature “pictures” as people like Tolkien did in his).  So, I would caution parents regarding these dark scenes and I would recommend this book for older kids only.  I think one of my favorite parts of the book is how Ani finds “her people.”  While Ani is a princess, she doesn’t really have a group of friends to call her own.  But when she becomes a goose girl, she finds friends among the other animal workers who all become a little community of sorts, and I love that.   We all need a few “real peeps” of our own!

“Right now I’d like all my troubles to stand in front of me in a straight line, and one by one I’d give each a black eye.“

“… If we don’t tell strange stories, when something strange happens we won’t believe it.”